Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals

"The US had the highest contamination rate, at 94%, with plastic fibres found in tap water sampled at sites including Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York. Lebanon and India had the next highest rates."

"European nations including the UK, Germany and France had the lowest contamination rate, but this was still 72%."

Re: Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals

they took 159 samples worldwide. They do not mention their sampling methodology other than to give a mean number of fibres per 500ml per country and mention 3 locations in the US.
They may well be right and billions of people are exposed to plastic microparticles in water or there again they might be using bad science and somewhere between 100 and 145 people worldwide are exposed. Now quite so dramatic news in that. Conflating the supposed problem by inclusion of a separate study on a different problem doesnt make it any more valid and will make peopel immume to the genuine problem of marine litter.
Like so many other press releases of this tye it makes a mockery of scientific research in general and can easily be discounted as "please give me more money for my research" due to the dearth of proper attention to epidemiological rigour.
Also, they dont and cant say wheter this is actuallu a public health matter. You can report that all sorts of minerals are found in tap water and that the background radiation on beaches in Cornwall are higher than those in Norfolk but without consideringa a TLV it is all meaningless.

Re: Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals

bad science doesnt become good science just because you dont like being told that some article you found is basically flawed in its methodology and application (or lack of) of statistical method and quality control.
Also the study has been instigated and published by a company that is a campaigning media co and has not been published in one of the well known scientific journals like Nature or New Scientist and has not been the subject of any sort of peer review, a vital step to getting a study into the mainstream.
As said, it may be important but the way it has been conducted and reported means that it cannot be taken seriously and so damages other causes or research of a similar nature by association as no-one will ever cite it but will be compared to it.. I can find huindreds of other articles published on analytical methodology and water chemistry in all sorts of journals and many of the ones that are pertinent are written by an ex colleague of mine. (worked together 1980-88 when he went elsewhere)

Re: Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals

With just so few samples tested worldwide this is hardly to be considered a reliable information.
It's worrying that plastic has been found in tap water, but a much larger, independent research is needed before anything else can be said.
It would be like taking a few hundred sea water temperature readings in carefully selected locations in particular conditions and claim that the oceans around the world are getting warmer.
Oh hung on, they already did that...

Re: Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals

China to stop taking UK plastic waste, meaning UK will have to find other recycling options.

Quite a big problem to resolve in a short amount of time. You can't set up the huge factories needed to melt the plastic down into plastic blocks very quickly. The sheer volume of plastic to be processed would require sites of an enormous size and would be very expensive to set up in the UK or Europe. I should imagine that polution would be a problem as well, when they melt plastic as part of the recycling process.

Re: Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals

Re: Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals

The UK like to recycle the cheaper plastics that are easy to sort and handle.
All plastics can be used as fuel as they are essentially petroleum products and the calorific value you get from burning them is equal to the energy taken to manufacture them so that way it can be said to be having a neutral effect on the planet.

What we dont have however is a plethora of power stations designed or adapted to burn the stuff and trying to persuade some that it would be a good idea will be a non starter.

As a race we have to accept we either thrive by destroying eveything else on this earth or we make a decision to halt the population growth and reverse it massively to get to no more than 5 billion, 2 billion being a better number if you want the rest of the ecology to recover.
In the short term we need to accept the cost of fully recycling our waste and not shovel the problem on to the third world.

I was reading a paper recently on using chicken feathers as a building insulation material.
We eat 893 million chickens a day so that is a lot of feathers that get discarded.

Plastic can be made into bricks and used for rapid building erection and would be ideal for places that were flattened by hurricanes.
Again they would be a short term answer and they would be pretty ugly but light, transportable and cost effective.
All you need to consider is how to recycle a plasic shack that has been deposited in say Haiti when it is no longer needed.

UB's points about pollution are already addressed in a couple of waste incinerator power stations.
Again it down to cost and the efficiency of bodies llike local authorities in grading their waste.

Biodogestors make methans gas for power generation and you end up with compost to boot but you also produce as much CO2 as methane (cant be helped the bacteria have to respire).

Fuel cells produce water, all of these are greenhouse gases but we fixate on the CO2, which hasnt reached the saturation point that plants actually would like to live in as being the only one that matters.

So why dont we utilise the technology more?
You will have to ask the ecowarriors that, they are the ones who climbed the chimneys of SELCHP to stop it from being commissioned when it had been running for 2 years and also say we should compost everything. Well, as said that bioactivity produces greenhouses gases that are then just released into the atmosphere when they could be a resource.

The Eden Project coat £141 million, my proposal to use the cornish alps for roadstone for the M25 and transporting London's waste on the return trip for the ships carrying the stone would have made a profit of about £10k a load but reduced the costs of both the aggregate and the disposal of the rubbish by 90%. It is reckoned that the value to the local economy by having the Eden Project there has been over a billion quid so there are 2 sides to every coin.